'Astounded' Dame Helen to visit her lost Russian family

Saturday 21 October 2006 20:22 BST

Dame Helen Mirren has admitted that she was 'astounded and thrilled' at The Mail on Sunday's discovery of her long-lost family in Russia.

Last week, after two years of painstaking research, this newspaper disclosed how the actress has relatives in Moscow whom she didn't even know existed. Now Dame Helen - tipped for an Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen - has revealed she intends to travel to meet them for the first time.

"I am really grateful and so moved by what you have discovered about my family in Russia,' she said from America, where she is promoting The Queen. "I just want to say thank you.

"After so long - the Russian Revolution, the Stalin years, the Second World War - I could never have expected to find anyone.

"I was so sure that my relatives had been sent to Siberia during the Stalin period and had suffered a gruesome fate in the Gulags."

She admitted she had been planning a trip to Russia with her sister Kate to see if they could trace anyone. "But I am not sure we would have had any success,' she said. "Now, after The Mail on Sunday's discoveries, I will fly to Moscow as soon as I can to meet the descendants of my great aunts. I am astounded and thrilled you have found them."

Dame Helen was born Ilyena Mironov but her father Vasily, fearing discrimination for his family, anglicised their names and urged them to forget their Russian roots.

Her grandfather Pyotr Mironov had been an envoy of Tsar Nicholas II and became stranded in London during the Bolshevik Revolution, never to see his motherland again. For years he wrote to his six sisters, and Dame Helen recently starred in a radio play based on the letters they sent him back and his unpublished memoirs, which she found in his old wooden trunk.

But around 1930 the letters ceased, and the actress, along with her sister and brother Peter, had no knowledge of what happened to their Russian relatives.

Last week, The Mail on Sunday revealed how three of the sisters married and had children. We tracked down two modern-day relatives - Ilyena Bogacheva, 34, and Lydia Gvozdeva, 62 - who were as stunned as Dame Helen to discover their connection.

"We have heard of Helen Mirren, of course, but never imagined she could be our relative,' said Lydia.

Dame Helen, who stars in the last ever episode of Prime Suspect on ITV tonight, was brought up in Essex and recalled how "I sat on my grandfather's knee and he told me stories about Russia which seemed as if they were from the pages of Chekhov.

"My grandfather would be so proud that we have made contact again and gone back to the place where he was born and where the family was so happy before the Revolution. I find it so incredible that, all this time, the letters from my grandfather to his sisters were being looked after in Russia and that The Mail on Sunday has uncovered them. I thank all involved from the bottom of my Russian heart."